Doctors Urged To Help In Violence Prevention

Guns Seen As Serious Threat To Public Health

January 29, 1998|By Valerie Q. Carino, Tribune Staff Writer.

It was a situation Dr. Leslie Zun had faced a hundred times: a sobbing mother racing into the emergency room with a child who had been shot.

The victim was a 3-year-old girl who had been playing in her neighborhood less than a block from Mt. Sinai Hospital Medical Center. Just a few hours after the child caught a bullet in the back of her head, Zun would have to tell her mother there was nothing he could do. Her baby was gone.

Zun is one of scores of doctors across the country who, by virtue of their profession, encounter the tragic outcomes of gun violence on a daily basis. So when two of the leading medical associations in the country released the findings of a survey Wednesday saying guns pose a serious public health threat that needs to be addressed by physicians, he and others were not surprised.

Dr. Michelle Gittler, director of rehabilitation at Cook County Hospital and associate medical director at Schwab Rehabilitation Hospital, said that because there are an estimated 36,000 gun-related deaths a year, doctors should be involved not just in treatment of gun injuries but also in prevention.

The survey, funded by the Joyce Foundation in Chicago and the Brain Injury Association in Alexandria, Va., was commissioned by the American College of Physicians and the American College of Surgeons in 1996. It is one of the few surveys to ask doctors whether they consider gun violence a national health issue, according to Dr. Christine Cassel, former president of the American College of Physicians.

"What was striking to me was that doctors feel that this is a very important issue that needs to be addressed, and yet when you ask doctors what they're doing, they're not doing anything," Cassel said.

But locally, that has not been the case.

A program called In My Shoes, started at Schwab last year, offers juvenile offenders the chance to meet former gang members who, as a result of their criminal activities, have become paralyzed. Another program, scheduled to start in March at Mt. Sinai, will offer counseling, financial support and medical services to gunshot victims who would otherwise not seek help.

"I'm just tired of saying I'll just sew the child up and send him back," Zun said.